15.5 Cheap tricks

Here are a few tricks that you can use to make maintainership
easier:

When people report bugs, ask them to use the --config,
--debug, or --features flags, if you think they will help
you. These flags are there to help you get information directly, rather
than having to trust second-hand observation.

Rather than reconfiguring libtool every time I make a change to
ltmain.in, I keep a permanent libtool script in my
PATH, which sources ltmain.in directly.

The following steps describe how to create such a script, where
/home/src/libtool is the directory containing the libtool source
tree, /home/src/libtool/libtool is a libtool script that has been
configured for your platform, and ~/bin is a directory in your
PATH:

The output of the final ‘libtool --version’ command shows that the
ltmain.in script is being used directly. Now, modify
~/bin/libtool or /home/src/libtool/ltmain.in directly in
order to test new changes without having to rerun configure.